The Design District
Final Thoughts on Milan, Part Two
Today I’m posting Damon’s final two posts from Milan. ‘Til next year …
To round out the fair, I went back to B&B Italia and was able to speak to most of their major designers. The most interesting was my chat with the effervescent Jean-Marie Massaud. We began the interview as he invited me to “get comfortable” as he laid sideways across a large sectional. Being a pretty jet-lagged, this sounded great, but it made it pretty hard to write.
I started off asking him if he had gotten some inspiration for his new chaise lounge for B&B from some of the Eames’s work. He said emphatically no. This was designed purely based on function and then made to look beautiful.
Massaud was extremely passionate about his work, but he admitted he had some regrets about some of the resorts he’s designed. To visit a place is to ruin a place, he said, so to make up for this he told me about a project he was working on in Mexico, which he ultimately took away from Jean Nouvel. The client had come to see Massaud about a resort, and told him he was going to visit Nouvel about a new soccer stadium. They started talking about what Massaud would do with the project and eventually the client awarded him the project also.
The project posed quite a few challenges: During a month the stadium is only used twice, and the rest of the time it’s vacant. The parking around it kills the life of the area, and it the stadiums are placed in lower income areas, so it has an especially devastating effect on the poor. Massaud redesigned it to create green space surrounding the stadium and build underground parking. The resulting shape looks like volcano. For shade what is better than clouds. Man made clouds could also be used to project on and when not in use for advertisement they could be a beautiful sculpture. He integrates the same line of thinking in his water faucets and all his other products. He was really a joy to speak with.
